A single chance or decision is all it takes to turn a business into gold!
The primary objective of any small business is to grow and earn more. Every small decision that you make contributes to this. But what small businesses need is a push. The thing is, whatever you are providing, your competition is also providing at the same or a lesser rate, even they use social media promotions such as use Instagram followers app, so what is unique about you, why should people come to you rather than going to your competition?
It’s just about recognizing the opportunity and taking it.
Even Google is no stranger to this. In the early life of Google, it had no business model. At that stage, Google was desperately looking for opportunities to generate profit as they had no stable revenue resources. In 2002, Google realized that the online advertising market was growing at a rapid speed. Therefore, it decided to die in this market.
In 2003, the company launched its Adwords program, known as Google Ads, and this became the golden ticket for Google. The program allowed businesses to show ads to people searching on Google. Shortly after, Google turned to an advertising hulk from a popular search engine.
In 2008, Google reported to the SEC that it had generated $21 billion in advertising-driven revenue alone. Even today, Adwords contributes the highest to Google’s total revenue and profit.
It was just a matter of recognizing the opportunity and acting towards it. Every year, so many companies are coming up with recognition and are growing like crazy. This year is no stranger to this, many companies will grow, as and when they recognize the opportunity and by working smartly and differently.
Being today’s generation, we lack patience. We want faster results and if we run a business, we want it to grow as fast as possible so that it generates high profits and we can fulfil all of our dreams. The factor that is constantly changing and growing in the world is technology. You can do wonders with your product if you use the latest technology. Therefore you should include adopting new technology in your business’s growth project roadmap.
Moreover, the development rates in the field of technology are fast, and faster is their evolution and expiry. But, if you will not keep up with these changes, you are exposing yourself to the risk of being left behind. Each technology is an answer to a problem or to factors affecting productivity, that means it is going to make the whole process or some part of it easier. Even a small help is good if you are a small business owner as we know that you were many different hats at the same time.
In this article, I will share the top 5 emerging trends in technology that small businesses should look forward to:
1. AI as a service:
AI is no less than magic. You can get all the characters of the Disney film – Beauty and the Beast in your home, which was frankly my dream when I saw the movie.
You can talk to the devices, you can make them learn new things, just order them and they will do the work on the given time, all this and so many other things. You can either implement this on your device or use it to help you with your day to day activities.
Although, artificial intelligence is affecting your life, whether you know it or not.
Devices like Google assistant, Siri, Alexa, navigation apps, cab booking apps like Uber and Ola, live streaming services like Facebook or Instagram, all these can learn your interest and previous inputs and thus they show you personalized suggestions.
Artificial intelligence can do the work more accurately and faster than humans. You can either implement this in your product or software so that the users can have a better experience or you can utilize this technology to increase your productivity.
Let Artificial Intelligence do repetitive tasks so that you and the team can focus on more important tasks or on tasks that require human input.
2. 5G Data Network:
If your product is based on IoT, then this is the golden year for you.
5G was first introduced in the first half of 2019, but it was related to certain big cities and was expensive for the common people to opt for. But 2020 is when the 5G network will spread and become cheaper. The network comes with super-fast download speed and upload speeds with the benefit of a better and stable connection.
When the 5G network becomes cheap, everyone will shift to it. The only thing that smart devices need is a stable connection and with 5G networks, the devices can get them on the move too. People would be able to stream videos at higher quality, they would be able to listen to higher quality music and they would also be able to use smart devices everywhere.
With 5G networks, mobile networks will become faster than the wired connections that people use in their home or office. Therefore, if you are into the Smart devices business, you should consider updating your devices to 5G networks as your project objective.
3. Electric vehicles and autonomous driving:
Green is the new green. i.e environment-friendly products and services are attracting more money. Therefore you should include this in your product’s project scope if you wish to take advantage of this information.
The UK government is planning to ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2035. This will increase the air quality and thus pubic will support the decision. This will also increase the sales of electronic cars. A new electric car is sold every 15 minutes, according to a report.
This shows that the industry is growing and will grow more speedily as the year pass. Therefore, as a small business, you should take advantage of this situation and you should design a product or service that is designed for this industry.
While autonomous driving is not something we will see until a few years, other autonomous features are going to become more common among new cars – such as automatic braking and lane changing.
The autonomous car industry will change how cab services like Ola and Uber work. Within a few years, when you book a cab, a vehicle with no driver will come to pick you up.
4. Cybersecurity:
Alexa is used as a personal assistant. All Smart devices can be connected with Alexa, and thus they all can be controlled just by giving voice input to Alexa. Artificial intelligence technology is evolving fast to the point that we have automatic speech recognition software.
As the use of artificial intelligence is increasing, it is opening a window of possibility for hackers. This leads to a dire situation of a requirement of increased cybersecurity. Cybersecurity has been there in the market for quite some time but as the use and requirements of hardware authentication, cloud technology and augmented learning are growing constantly, the need for improved cybersecurity will grow too.
People insert so much personal information over the internet that we are totally vulnerable online. As a business, if you are using a cloud-based project management software for project execution, your whole business procedure is saved in the cloud. Here, security is very crucial for your business.
This is where blockchain technology comes into play. Blockchain is a decentralized database that is shared over the internet. The blocks are connected to specific hash codes. This is what bitcoin used to be secure. Blockchains can be used in various ways to offer decentralization, security and flexibility. In the beginning, some commentators argued that technology is over-hyped and is not useful for the future. But the fact that IBM, Mastercard, FedEx and Walmart started using blockchain in 2019 proved their comments otherwise.
5. Cloud Computing:
Its been so long since I saw a Pendrive or I have downloaded anything.
We listen to music online, we stream movies and series online, without downloading anything, this shows how impactful cloud computing is.
Cloud computing uses the internet and remote servers to maintain and store data. It also provides internet-based development and services. Cloud computing eliminates the cost of hardware and electricity, you can access the desired information from anywhere and anytime. This ultimately allows you and the team to work from anywhere and anytime and thus it improves your overall productivity.
There are 3 basic categories of cloud computing services – Software as a service(Saas), Platform as a service(Paas) and Infrastructure as a service(Iaas).
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